1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a rendering processing method and apparatus, which render, for example, three-dimensional image information upon a two-dimensional screen such as a television monitor, a recording medium having recorded therein a rendering processing program, and the rendering processing program.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, video game units and personal computers continue to see advances in, for example, high degree of integration and high speed of processors, memory, and the like. Accordingly, a rendering processing device configured with such game console units and personal computers produces finer, high-definition two-dimensional images which are rich with diversity and which appear more life-like and give a higher sense of realism from three-dimensional image information, and is capable of rendering these images upon a two-dimensional screen.
Meanwhile, a video game user, for example, desires not only games having life-like images, but also games using images in styles such as handwritten cel animation. Images in the cel animation style mentioned above are generally produced through the use of a rendering process called cartoon shading (or cel shading).
On the other hand, most recently, images in a hand-drawn style giving an even more interesting flavor than cel animation-styled images have been desired. Nevertheless, conventional cartoon shading processes can produce images close to hand-drawn cel images, but expression of flavorful and hand-drawn illustration styled images is difficult.